Christmas, New Year and Surgery

Merry belated Christmas to everybody. Drew had to work over Christmas weekend so Vince, Linda and Tony came up and celebrated Christmas with us up here. We had a really good time opening up presents and playing with all of Emma's new toys. Also we had a good time playing Apples to Apples once Emma went to bed. If anybody has not played Apples to Apples I have to say it can get to be a very interesting game (It can also be pretty embarrassing).

Drew had his back surgery today. We went into the hospital at 6am and they took him back for surgery about 8am and were done around 10am. Thankfully everything went great. For those of you wondering exactly what he had to have surgery for I will try and explain what they did. As I said in my last post Drew had a herniated disk in is lower back that had to be taken care of. The surgeon went in and removed the part of the disk that had herniated. By noon he was able to keep food down and had gotten up and walked around so they released him figuring that he would be more comfortable at home. Drew will be off work for 2 weeks and cannot lift anything over 10lbs for the next 4 - 8 weeks. Now we just have to get him to follow doctor's orders. According the the doctor and nurse this Sunday and Monday will probably be really bad and after that he should just slowly get better. We would like to thank everybody for keeping him in your thoughts and prayers

Because of Drew's surgery and everything as most of you can probably guess we will not be doing anything for New Years but we would like to wish everybody a happy new year.

Here are some pictures from Christmas weekend.

Family Get Together and Back Surgery

Emma and I went to Jasper this weekend to visit with family. The Hartings Christmas party was on Saturday and it was really nice being able to see everybody and Emma had a blast playing with the rest of the kids. Thankfully she was able to take at least a little nap while everybody else ate. Then Saturday night we went back to Mom and Dad's and celebrated Christmas with our family. Drew had to work which is why he did not come home and he has to work Christmas weekend also which is why we went ahead and celebrated Christmas. It was the only time it worked for everybody else to get together and do it.

Vince, Linda and Tony are going to come up here and celebrate Christmas with us this weekend.

Drew had an appointment with the back specialist this morning. The specialist looked at the MRI and checked Drew over and then said his only option was surgery. He has a really bad herniated disk between his L5 and S1 vertebrae. It is to the point that the specialist wanted to get him in for surgery as soon as possible. The doctor called the neurosurgeon and they were going to try and to the surgery tomorrow already but Drew's primary doctor has him taking aspirin every day so they have to wait at least 5 days for that to get out of his system. More then likely he will end up having surgery early next week.

Please keep him in your thoughts and hope that everything goes well.

Snow

I took Emma out with me on Saturday to shovel snow from the driveway. We did not take Emma out in the snow last year so this was her first experiance with show. At first she was not to sure what to think of it and she did not like being in the grass where the snow was deeper but she had fun playing with the snow in the driveway and helping me clear the driveway.

Drew's Back

Drew did something to his back a couple of weeks ago and despite the ER visit, Doctor Visit and Chiropractor Visits he has not gotten a whole lot better. He did go back to work this week but has been in quite a bit of pain so he went back to the doctor this morning. The doctor now thinks that he may have a slipped disk so they gave him some pretnazone to see if that would help and told him not to go into work again this weekend. If the pretnazone does not help then they are going to have to so imaging on his back and he might have to have surgery.

I knew that back problems were a possibility because they run on Vince's side of the family but I was really hoping that Drew might be spared or that they at least would not start this early in life. It is really hard to see him in pain and Emma just does not understand why daddy has not been playing with her and holding her.

Here's hopping the the pretnazone works and Drew gets to feeling better again.